The Young Magician

temper, but the few times he did kept everyone well behaved.

‘How is Jason faring?’ Mother asked Lee with some concern.

‘He’ll live,’ Samuel’s brother replied bluntly as he drew a great flour sack down from the wagon into his arms. His mother seemed worried for a moment, then rubbed her brow with her sleeve and turned to her younger son.

‘Perhaps you could do some chores for me today, Samuel,’ she suggested as she gathered up the string of fish and stepped down to the ground.

Samuel hopped from the cart. ‘Yes, Mother,’ he answered, nodding. He did sometimes do chores, but with his brothers and sister to do all the real work, he knew he was not really needed. Besides, he was far too small to do anything very useful.

Watching Lee carry the great sack of flour into the house, Samuel wondered what it would be like to be grown. He wanted to be as strong as his brothers-as strong as Lee-but he also noticed how they had considerably less time to play. Perhaps this was not entirely a fair trade. When he was grown, Samuel was sure he would still play games and wander through the woods and spend as many afternoons as possible lying on his back by the river, bathing in the sun, then running and splashing in the water as he pleased. There was something wrong for grown- ups to take matters so seriously and leave such little time for adventures. It just didn’t seem to make sense.

Dragging the apple basket from the seat, the daydreaming boy waddled inside. The wooden floor creaked as he stepped through the doorway. Their house squeaked a lot and made all kinds of other noises, especially at night and especially when it was stormy. Father was forever fixing one part of it or another and Samuel supposed it was just the way of old things to be so noisy and easily broken.

Mother was putting all the bought things onto the shelves and into the cupboards, while Lee could be heard grunting out the back, carting the sacks of dried corn they would give to the chickens through the winter. Mother turned from her chore and sighed as she looked towards the bedroom, where Jason lay soundly sleeping. She walked over to his side, brushing Samuel’s hair absently as she passed, and placed a palm to Jason’s brow, thoughtfully. After a moment, she sat on the very edge of the bed and took Jason’s limp hand in hers with a gentle squeeze.

Jason looked ever so dull next to Mother’s healthy shine. That’s what Mother had called it a few days ago when Samuel had asked why Jason looked so dim, while she was so bright. A ‘healthy shine’, she had said. Samuel remembered people saying that quite often, especially Tom’s father. He had told Samuel that he was a glowing lad several times, and once he had told Tom’s mother that she looked as radiant as the sun itself. Samuel did not think she was that bright. She was as bright as a star or a distant candle perhaps, but not like the sun at all.

Jason slept peacefully as Mother bent and whispered in his ear, then kissed him softly on the forehead. Then she turned her attention to Samuel, still standing in the living room with the basket in his arms.

‘Why don’t you go and feed the chickens then, while I finish putting these things away?’ she asked. ‘And then help Lee in the barn. Did you hear that Lee?’ she called out a little louder through the window. ‘Samuel is going to help you in the barn.’

Lee’s response was an audible moan of disappointment.

Mother gave a stern look at Samuel. ‘Don’t leave your brother to do everything, as usual. It’s about time you learned to be responsible.’

He nodded and pushed the apple basket up onto the table, then trotted outside, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. His mother watched him leave and smiled. After a few long moments of staring into empty space, she lowered Jason’s hand back to his side and came out of the bedroom to return to her task. As she passed the table, she absent-mindedly plucked up an apple from Samuel’s basket and was surprised to feel something soft and wet underneath. She turned the shiny red fruit over in her hands and smiled knowingly as she spied the ugly-looking bruises that had been hidden skilfully underneath.

Lee was still unhitching Aaron from the cart, so Samuel grabbed up a heavy bucket of scraps from beside the water trough and set off towards the barn. He had to grasp the vessel tightly in both hands and lean right over towards one side just to keep from tipping over and it thumped his leg with each step as he walked, making it all the more difficult. Being big must be one reason why the grown-ups did all the work. Everything was much harder for small hands and small legs.

The chickens snapped up the scraps eagerly before the pieces had even hit the ground. They clucked and flapped their wings with great excitement, frantic to peck up the tiny morsels. The geese were far less excitable, instead carefully picking up the scraps that almost landed on top of them, raising their long necks to the sky as they swallowed. When the chickens came too near, however, the geese would hiss and stretch out their wings until the chickens darted away again. They were funny birds, the geese, but Samuel liked to feed them the most.

When the bucket was empty, Samuel set it down and watched the birds peck up the last pieces and then begin scratching at the ground. His gaze moved slowly from the dark brown soil to the sunlit treetops up on Miller’s Hill where so many of his adventures had been born. There, the trees made stairways with their trunks and bridges with their branches. Leaves became walls and gaps became windows. Outstretching roots formed cells for prisoners or mysterious caverns where adventures were waiting to be had. Only scant moments passed before any thoughts of chores were long gone and Samuel’s legs had carried him beyond the edge of the woods, where he vanished amongst the trees and shrubs.

Over by the emptied cart, Lee scratched his head quizzically, surveying the empty space where his little brother had been standing only some few moments before.

Deep in the woods, each and every narrow and crooked path had its own destination that Samuel knew as well as Mother knew her kitchen cupboards. On his right, he passed the dark, almost-hidden tunnel that he had forged through the thorny blackberries, which led to the deer glade. He wandered past the wide, stony path that wound its way up to the lookout on the rocks where he could survey the barren gully. He even went past the rain- scoured path that led to the wild orchard, which only he and Tom knew about, where they could sit and eat their pick of fruits all day long, even if many of them were bird-pecked and wormy.

Today, however, he had just one destination on his mind. He continued ever on, inwards and upwards and deeper into the woods, taking the long, narrow and difficult path on which he had to scale rocks as high as himself and duck under the mossy, fallen trunks of giant trees and then push through masses of cool and shady ferns. It was the most difficult path of all, but by far the most rewarding.

At last, panting and tired, he stepped up onto the great shattered stump, ten times as wide as he was tall. A giant of a tree must have stood there at one time, but now its shattered stump was all that remained. The forest had very few such trees remaining, but Father said that further into the mountains, in the hard-to-reach valleys where tigers and bears still made their homes, such trees grew abundantly.

Here, the woods were below him and he could look back down onto the farm far below. Tom’s house sat beside the snaking, dark line of the river and other farms and cottages peeped out from beneath the trees all the way to the village. He turned his back on them all, however, to see what was immediately below.

At the great stump’s far edge, where it was green with moss, the ground fell abruptly away. Down there was Bear Valley; he had named it after once seeing a great brown animal below. It had been wading in the shallow waters and had raised its head towards him and sniffed the air before turning and lumbering into the trees. How the great creature had clambered into the gorge, Samuel still did not know, even after launching an exhaustive investigation. The treacherous route that led down from the great stump was the only way into the valley that he could find, despite his many hours of searching and scouring the slippery rock faces. Thin trees forced their way from cracks in the sheer stone and stretched up, like gesturing arms towards the sky, but it would be a dangerous route to attempt to climb these almost-vertical walls-for a bear or a boy. Father had said bears were more nimble-footed than they seemed, but surely not even they could mount those treacherous surfaces. Samuel had asked a few sly questions and Father had said that such wild animals did not live around here any more as people had hunted them for their meat and fur and they had enough sense to keep away from the homes of men. Father had not seen one in Stable Waterford for many a year and only occasionally would one of the wild huntsmen emerge from the mountains with a pelt or a claw to sell.

Samuel counted this as his special place, for no one else he knew had seen a bear and no one knew of Bear Valley. No one had probably ever been here before, beside himself. The thought made him feel special and exalted-he was the King of Bear Valley and what adventures he